Moving from hype to practice is an important but challenging step for ICT4D practitioners. As the technical adviser for digital development at IREX, a global development and education organization, I’ve been watching with cautious optimism as international development stakeholders begin to explore how artificial intelligence tools like machine learning can help them address problems and introduce efficiencies to amplify their impact.

So while USAID was developing theirguide to making machine learning work for international development and TechChange rolled out theirnew courseon Artificial Intelligence for International Development, we spent a few months this summer exploring whether we could put machine learning to work to measure media quality.

Of course, we didn’t turn to machine learning just for the sake of contributing to the “breathless commentary of ML proponents” (as USAID aptly puts it).

As we shared in asessionwith our artificial intelligence partnerLoreatMERLTech DC 2018, some of our programs face a very real set of problems that could be alleviated through smarter use of digital tools.

Our Machine Learning Experiment

In our USAID-funded Media Strengthening Program in Mozambique, for example, a small team of human evaluators manually score thousands of news articles based on18 measures of media quality.

This process is time consuming (some evaluators spend up to four hours a day reading and evaluating articles), inefficient (when staff turns over, we need to reinvest resources to train up new hires), and inconsistent (even well-trained evaluators might score articles differently).

To test whether we can make the process of measuring media quality less resource-intensive, wespent a few monthstraining software to automatically detect one of these 18 measures of media quality: whether journalists keep their own opinions out of their news articles. The results of this experiment are very compelling:

The software had 95% accuracyin recognizing sentences containing opinions within the dataset of 1,200 articles.

The software’s ability to “learn” was evident. Anecdotally, the evaluation team noticed a marked improvement in the accuracy of the software’s suggestions after showing it only twenty sentences that had opinions. The accuracy, precision, and recall results highlighted above were achieved after only sixteen rounds of training the software.

Accuracy and precision increasedthe more that the model was trained. There is a clear relationship between the number of times the evaluators trained the software and the accuracy and precision of the results. The recall results did not improve over time as consistently.

What does this all mean? Let’s start with the good news. The results suggest that some parts of media quality—specifically, whether an article is impartial or whether it echoes its author’s opinions—can be automatically measured by machine learning.

The software also introduces the possibility of unprecedented scale, scanning thousands of articles in seconds for this specific indicator. These implications introduce ways for media support programs to spend their limited resources more efficiently.

3 Lessons Learned from using Machine Learning

Of course, the machine learning experience was not without problems. With any cutting-edge technology, there will be lessons we can learn and share to improve everyone’s experience. Here are our three lessons learned working with machine learning:

1. Forget about being tech-literate; we need to be more problem-literate.

Defining a coherent, specific, actionable problem statement was one of the important steps of this experiment. This wasn’t easy. Hard trade-offs had to be made (Which of 18 indicators should we focus on?), and we had to focus on things we could measure in order to demonstrate efficiency games using this new approach (How much time do evaluators currently spend scoring articles?).

When planning your own machine learning project, devote plenty of time at the outset—together with your technology partner—to define the specific problem you’ll try to address. These conversations result in a deeper shared understanding of both the sector and the technology that will make the experiment more successful.

2. Take the time to communicate results effectively.

Since completing the experiment, people have asked me to explain how “accurate” the software is. But in practice, machine learning software uses different methods to define “accuracy”, which in turn can vary according to the specific model (the software we used deploys several models).

What starts off as a simple question (How accurate is our software?) can easily turn into a discussion of related concepts like precision, recall, false positives, and false negatives. We found that producing clean visuals (like this or this) became the most effective way to explain our results.

3. Start small and manage expectations.

Stakeholders with even a passing awareness of machine learning will be aware of its hype. Even now, some colleagues ask me how we “automated the entire media quality assessment process”—even though we only used machine learning to identify one of 18 indicators of media quality. To help mitigate inflated expectations, we invested a small amount into this “minimum viable product” (MVP) to prove the fundamental concept before expanding on it later.

Approaching your first machine learning project this way might help to keep expectations in line with reality, minimize risks associated with experimentation, and provide air cover for you to adjust your scope as you discover limitations or adjacent opportunities during the process.